Unsaid
5 Kinds of Games to Play After Dinner With Someone You Love
The best evenings rarely need a reservation. They happen at the kitchen table after the plates are cleared, when somebody asks if anyone wants to play something. Here are five kinds of games worth saying yes to, whether it's the two of you, a couple of old friends, or the grown kids home for the weekend. Most of them work tonight with whatever is already in the kitchen drawer.
Full disclosure: we make the game at #6. The other five we just like.
1. Classic card games
A deck of cards is the most patient thing in the house. It waits in the junk drawer for months and is ready the second you are. Gin rummy is the classic for two: quick hands, simple rules, and just enough strategy that the winner gets to be a little smug about it.
Cribbage is the one with the wooden board and the pegs. If someone at your table grew up playing it, let them teach you, and ask where they learned. You usually get the rules and a story in the same breath, and the story tends to involve a grandfather, a porch and a coffee can full of dimes. For a bigger table, crazy eights is easy enough for a nine-year-old and still fun for everybody else.
Try this: Keep one running gin rummy score on a sheet of paper taped inside a cupboard door. A tally that lasts all winter is more fun than any single game, and whoever is behind on Sunday night does the dishes.
2. Board games for two (or a few)
Chess, checkers and backgammon have been around for centuries for a simple reason: they work. Chess is quiet and slow. Backgammon is fast, noisy and full of dice, which means the better player doesn't always win. That's good news for the rest of us.
If you'd rather be on the same team, try a cooperative board game. Everyone at the table plays together against the game itself, so you win together or lose together. Nobody gloats, and nobody sulks on the way up to bed.
Try this: Set up a chessboard on a side table and leave it there. Make one move each time you walk past. A single game can last all week, and it gives you something to tease each other about over breakfast.
3. Word games
Word games need almost nothing: a pencil, some paper, maybe a bag of letter tiles. Twenty questions works in the car, in the kitchen or in line at the hardware store. Charades is the one that gets the grown kids laughing at their parents, and the parents laughing right back.
Word-building tile games reward whoever knows that "qi" is a real word. Everyone else gets to complain about it, which is half the entertainment.
Try this: Play a round of Ghost after dinner. Take turns adding one letter to a growing word, and try not to be the one who completes a real word. Each time you do, you earn a letter of G-H-O-S-T. Spell the whole thing and you're out. No board, no box, just the table.
4. Puzzles, done together
A jigsaw on the kitchen table is a slow, friendly kind of game. Nobody has to talk, but everybody does. One person hunts for edges, another sorts the sky pieces, and somebody always palms the last piece so they get to put it in.
The Sunday crossword works the same way, with one pencil and two chairs pulled close. One of you knows the old movie stars. The other knows the rivers of Europe. Neither of you knows the four-letter Hawaiian goose, but you will both remember it next time. (It's nene.) A logic puzzle from the back of the paper makes a good second course.
Try this: Pick a 500-piece puzzle and leave it out all week. Give it ten minutes after dinner each night and see who can claim the most pieces by Friday.
5. Question games
This is the simplest game on the list, and often the one people are still talking about the next morning. A stack of question cards goes in the middle of the table. You take turns pulling one, answering it and passing the stack along. That's the whole game.
The good questions are small and specific: the best meal you ever ate on a trip, the first car you drove, the song you'd pick for a long drive. Nobody needs to be clever. And you end up hearing stories you somehow never heard, even from people you've shared a table with for decades.
Try this: No cards in the house? Write ten questions on scraps of paper, fold them into a bowl and take turns drawing. Keep them light: favorite summer job, worst haircut, best dog.
So which one should you try first?
Honestly, whichever one you'll actually play tonight. If there's a deck of cards in the drawer, deal a hand of gin rummy. If there's a puzzle in the closet, clear the table. The game matters less than the chairs pulled up to it.
But if you'd like one box that borrows a little from all five (the cards, the taking turns, the laughing, the stories), that's the reason we made the bonus.
Bonus #6: The Unsaid Deck (yes, this one is ours)
The Unsaid Deck is a boxed conversation card game. Inside are 50 photo cards, which are muted photographs with no fixed meaning, and 25 question cards.
Here's how you play. Pull a photo card, and everyone says the first thing they see. Then pull a question card and follow it. One round takes about sixty seconds. Nobody has to go first, and there's no way to play it wrong.
Say the photo is The Long Table and you pull the question card called The Title. It asks: "Give this image a title." Then: "What in your life could wear the same title?" Then: "Say one sentence about it, as if to a friend." One person sees a family reunion. Another sees every Thanksgiving since 1988. Somebody else just sees a lot of chairs to fold. All three are right. That's the whole idea: say what you see.
Other cards keep it just as simple: "Who would you show this image to?" "What did you notice first in this image?" "If this image were the front of a card, who would you send it to?" Each question card has three questions and level dots from 1 to 5, so you can start light and go as deep as the table wants.
Also in the box:
- A 48-page field guide with your first 5-minute round, a solo version and a version for two
- A quick-start card
- 350gsm matte cards
- A rigid keepsake box
It works for date night, game night, or the evening the whole family is finally around one table. It also makes an easy gift. The Unsaid Deck is $69.95, and there's a buy 2, get 1 free option: three decks for $139.90. The first edition ships by Tuesday, October 6, from the US (US shipping only), and every deck comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Whichever game you pick tonight, pull up a second chair. The dishes can wait.